COURSE DENOMINATION:

Philosophy of Economics

Lecturer: Carlo Martini (University of Helsinky)

Intensive Seminar: March 27 – March 30, 2017

About the course

The course is highly interactive. The lecturer will briefly introduce the topic, but most of the class will be focused around analysing, questioning, commenting, and debating about the readings.

Objectives:

This is a course that will improve your understanding of economics, its relation to and origination from philos- ophy, as well as put economics in perspective, as a science among other sciences. Economists are omnipresent in society, in the media, in government, in private corporations. It seems natural then that we should ask questions like what do they study, and how do they study it? What do they learn, and what do they do, in practice? How do they arrive at their private theories, and how do they support their public statements? As scientists, economists are a peculiar kind: not quite natural scientists, but different, at least they claim, from most other social scientists as well. Economics was born out of philosophy, but it has become a very different kind of discipline. Some claim it is more like a science, nowadays, but many still see strong connections between philosophical problems and economic ones. In this course we will explore many of the connections between philosophy and economics, many of the contemporary debates on economics and its method, and have a peak into the relation between economics and public policy.

Classes (daily):

Monday, March 27, 13:00 – 16:00

Tuesday, March 28, 13:00 –16:00

Wednesday, March 29, 10:00 – 13:00

Thursday, March 30, 10:00 – 13:00.

Assessment: TBD

Schedule of classes & readings

‹ A Reader containing all the following texts will be made available to the students. ‹

March 27, 2017 – Topic: Epistemology and economics

• John Stuart Mill (1836). “On the definition of political economy and on the method of philosophical investigation in that science.” London and Westminster Review (October). Reprinted as Essay V in Essays on some unsettled questions in political economy (1844). In Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 309-39.

• Harold Kincaid and Don Ross (2009). “Introduction: the new philosophy of economics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics. Edited by Harold Kincaid and Don Ross. Oxford University Press (2009): pp. 3–32.

• John B. Davis (2009). “Competing conceptions of the individual in recent economics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics. Edited by Harold Kincaid and Don Ross. Oxford University Press (2009): pp. 223–244.